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The importance of the video iPod is more far ranging than the product itself and transcends it, just like the effect of the original iPod on the music industry and even culturally in how we listen and relate to music. In the olden days we used to sit down and listen to albums in our living rooms on systems carefully tuned for sound quality. Now we listen to music in any sequence we want and mostly in shufle over some crappy headphones delivering 128kb limited sound. But the iPod has empowered us by untethering our music and allowing for serendipitous access to our deep libraries and not what we just bought last week. The video iPod also legitimizes in one fell swoop the act of paying for video and not getting a physical copy of it.. Delivery of DRM protected video content from all those myriad of startups is now suddenly legitimate.
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Engadget reports this morning that Apple’s invitation only event slated for today in New York City will be to unveil the much rumored PowerPC G970 dual core chipped G5 towers. The event is taking place at the Jacob Javitz on the eve of PhotoPlus Expo and the rumor mill is also expecting new G4 PowerBooks with increased resolution displays. I suspect Apple will throw in some other goodies into the bargain to convince you to not wait for the first gen Intel products slated for June 2006 but everybody expects an announcement in January’s Macworld Expo. My recommendation is to sit tight unless you have machines catching fire and wait for the Intel generation which will make these G5s look like an Atari 2600.

The DOJ has approved Adobe’s the 3.4 billion dollar acquisition of Macromedia leaving European approval as the only hurdle to the transaction. What this means is that you can say goodbye to Macromedia’s Freehand and Adobe’s GoLive in favor of Illustrator and Dreamweaver respectively. Though the demise of Freehand will only be mourned by about eleven users in all, GoLive has carved a nice niche for itself. I suspect that the FUD seeded by Microsoft with its announced 2006 release of new web design and authoring tools to replace the almost forgotten FrontPage must have had something to do with this marriage. I also think that this consolidation and churn may open the door for more mature development and popularity of open source alternatives like Gimp.

More info on this story here…

If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.
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The New York Times announced yesterday that it plans to start offering “shadow ads” layed down like a watermark under editorial content. Though they are starting by just placing a corporate logo under the stock listings (now, really, does anybody under the age of eighty still read those?) and they promise on a stack of bibles that they will only use it for special occassions (huh?). This is a bad symbolic move as the only edge that a place like the NY Times has is its respectability and that is too fragile now to be bruised by this blurring of content and advertising. The fact that other media outlets are doing it with entertainment doesn’t mean they should be doing it with news. I guess nobody cares anymore though.

Now that the suspense is over and we know that it is not THE video iPod that was much awaited, but a video enabled iPod nonetheless, there are sure to be content deal announcements and this is the first one I have seen. AdWeek is reporting that ABC will be offering at least five series, including the popular Desperate Housewives and Lost for download via iTunes. Now this may seem like a good idea at first, BUT,

• They will be charging $1.99 per show.
• The resolution of the video will be a quarter of a standard definition video screen (320×240) to match the resolution of the video-enabled iPod
• You will not be able to burn it to DVD or CD without going through an analog and redigitize cycle

The problem is that they are competing with full NTSC resolution bittorrents that people can download at will from the web, Sure, you have to know what to do to get the torrents and it is illegal but that does not seem to stop eDonkey and the rest of the Napster heirs on the music front. No word on whether they will have advertising on the downloaded video…Read more here..

This morning we have two interesting announcements from some important players in the creative Digital Asset Management front:

NAPC partners with Aprimo - This partnership between NAPC, probably the largest integrator in the DAM/Creative space and Aprimo, who just bought the old Doubleclick marketing workflow software, promises integration of DAM from Xinet with Aprimo’s workflow software. NAPC has been positioning itself as more of a developer and has expanded its own proprietary integration solutions such as overlays to make Xinet’s Webnative more powerful and accessible via an enhanced GUI. You can read the press release here…

Artesia announces integration with creative apps - Artesia’s Enterprise Content Management System is one of those DAMs that have until recently been a cumbersome fit with ad agencies and other creative shops. With their new version 6.5 though, they are adding tight integration with the Mac platform, Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. For the press release go here…

Slashdot has picked up an article published Monday in the Seattle Times describing how Microsoft has entered into contracts with four major telecomms companies in the US and a smattering overseas to provide next generation TV service over IP. Verizon launched a test deployment in Texas on September 22nd but could easily extend it out to anywhere it is offering their Fios fiber-to-the-home service. A user review of the Fios service can be found here…

Following Google’s and AOL’s lead, Yahoo has added blogs to it’s News search results further legitimizing them as a serious news source. There is already a long detailed review and critique at Search Engine Watch

Another tidbit from our enterprising French Mac addicts was posted on HardMac, the english language version of MacBidouille. They have screenshots showing monitoring of four CPU’s on the Intel development version of OSX. This would make for a screaming Photoshop box and some very competitive Xservers.

Original post here via Engadget